Mijn Tirades en Tieren

I had a great time at ReMIX South this year! It's been great to meet developers and designers and learn how they are using design tools of all sorts.

I am headed to Build later this month and am excited by both the Surface tablet and what the PC makers are going to show us in Windows 8 devices. But ahead of that show there have been a lot of reveals by the likes of HP, Dell, Lenovo and ASUS.

Like many of you, I've been itching to see what Anders had up his sleeve and I wasn't disappointed yesterday when they announced TypeScript. After teaching all day, I took a quick look at TypeScript (and I do mean quick).

I've been really busy lately and my list of things to blog on has been getting backed up. One thing that occurred to me while building my new JavaScript course was about how KnockoutJS and Observables actually work. Here's the deal.

On the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I am reflective of a difficult time for my country, the world and my own life. I had recently been laid off for the first time in my career...so when the attacks happened, I had all the time in the world to watch all the coverage I could. I was in Portland (Oregon) so I was not close, but it felt close. Watching this news happen in real-time was profound event for me. If I was closer, I hope that I would have jumped in to help. My heart sank for the victims and their families. I tried to make sense of this violent act...and it was simply senseless. At that Twin Towers; at the Pentagon and in that tragic field in Pennsylvania - the bravery and heroism that I have to believe I am not capable of.

If you are a C# developer who is ready to take on JavaScript, I have the course for you. The goal of the new course is to help C# developers understand the nature of JavaScript so you can write JavaScript like a native speaker. This is for developers who need JavaScript for any of the popular places to use JavaScript including:

Just finished my talk at DevLink on "A Better CSS: LESS is More…". It was a good crowd and I was surprised that so many people had already heard of LESS which is awesome. Hopefully I covered the breadth of the language. It was a fun crowd and it's been a fun conference. If you haven't had a chance to get to Chattanooga and see the fresh water aquarium, it shouldn't be missed!

I headed up to the Gwinnett .NET Users Group last night had we talked all about mobile web development using ASP.NET! If you were there, thanks for attending and here are the slides and code as promised!

I had a good time doing a couple of talks today. If you joined me online, thanks for coming. For those who missed my talks, they will be posting the videos on Channel 9. As promised you can get the slides and examples here for my talks:

A lot of people are writing about the possibility of a new era at Microsoft. As a cynical fanboy I am hoping that this turns out to be true. I think there are a lot of great things coming out of Redmond these days and they deserve credit for making real change.

So the Windows Phone event is over and I’ve had time to digest it somewhat and read between the lines. At the time (for those who read my twitter feed), I was quite reactionary and upset at much of the news. Most of this what as a user of a Windows Phone, not as a developer of a Windows Phone. Do note that another caveat is that I am an author of a Windows Phone 7.5 book, and the thought of my book being suddenly obsolete was upsetting as well (but that happens every time one of my books passes the new car smell line). So let me talk briefly about what I think about the news from both a user and a developer on the Windows Phone platform.

Just back from the CodeStock 2012 event and I want to thank Michael and everyone involved for a great event. I met a lot of great people and had a great time in Knoxville. Both sessions were well attended. I especially wanted to thank those attendees who attended my 2 1/2 hour marathon session on Modern Web Development (see my blog series on it here).

I'm using Windows 8 as my main OS on my work PC. Not a terribly good idea, but I want to feel how it is to work with on a day-by-day basis. I've been dong this since early in the Windows 2000 days (installing pre-release OSs by MS).

After a long gestation, I finally completed my Web Debugging course for Pluralsight. This new course covers the details of using the tools in the browsers to debug layout, JavaScript, CSS and networking. While the course shows you how to find the tools in all the major browsers, the focus is using Firefox and Firebug. Though the techniques shown in Firebug apply pretty seamlessly to all the browser tools. This course is not .NET specific, but should be useful to any web developers.

UPDATED: Changed links to be universal, not US specific.

My 2012 conference schedule is shaping up nicely. I will visiting a series of conferences, code camps and user groups this year. Last year I didn't do this nearly as much as I was building a failed product. So back to my love of badges and beer. If you have the opportunity to be at any of these great events, do it. I love them all. (Also, if you see me at an event, please stop by and say hello.  As many can attest, I don't bite much.)

This is another in my series about (hopefully) interesting JavaScript constructs that might surprise most C# developers. You can see others here: JavaScript for the C# Guy.

I got into a longish, public discussion last night about XAML versus the HTML/CSS stack last night. I think they both have merit and pros and cons but it made me decide to add a short series of posts that highlight some of the CSS things that surprised me most (like my JavaScript for the C# Guy posts - and yes, more of those are coming too).

This is the ninth of ten parts of this blog post. The topics will be:

So I've done it again.  I survived another 30 minutes with Woody and Keith. Whew. We had a good conversation about the current state of Web Development and the future of XAML development.